Flip-Flopping domains - 301 redirect question
-
We have a client who has had the following domain setup for some time:
longdomain.com 301 -> shortdomain.com
Now, they would like to go back to the original longdomain.com, and will have the following setup:
shortdomain.com 301 -> longdomain.com
Obviously, I'm concerned about redirect loops cached in the browser. I plan to have the 301's from longdomain.com changed over to 302's for two weeks ahead of the change, so that hopefully when the change happens, browsers and search engines are more ready to respond. I also plan to establish rel=canonical on the longdomain.com pages after the switch.
Is there anything else you'd recommend to help with the changeover? Should we plan for an intermediary period were both domains are serving the content, so that the redirects can be purged, before being re-established the other direction?
Thanks in advance.
-
right on. Also be sure to submit the "Change of Address" request in GSC
-
Hey Oleg,
Thanks, I'll include this idea in the discussion!
-
Hey Thomas,
They are reverting to a longer domain name that they had used in the past. Its a sort of rebranding effort. They want to move traffic from the short, intermediate domain back to the original, long domain; the wrinkle being that the long domain is currently 301'd to the short one, and the opposite needs to be true after the changeover.
-
is your client doing this simply to use a short domain like bit.ly or awe.sm ?
if so they should use one of the tools listed above will
Try
-
Hmm, how about you remove the 301s from long domain and set canonicals from shortdomain to longdomain. Eventually, shortdomain will be deindexed (or at least mostly deindexed) and then you can 301 to longdomain.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Htaccess or url rewrite module for Magento 301 redirects?
I need to do about 6000 redirects for a Magento site. The pages no longer exist. I have tried the URL rewrite module but it isn't working for me and I don't want to do 6000 redirects in the htaccess files. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
301 redirects aren't passing value.
We recently migrated our shop to a new platform. We are using Wordpress for our main website, but we wanted a separate installation of Wordpress for our shop, so we left the main blog where it was, but moved the shop to a /shop/ sub directory with it's on WP installation. So now we have 2 installations of Wordpress. However, since we've done this, none of the pages on the new shop are ranking for anything. Their page rank is 0, and Moz page authority is 1 for every page on the new site. I've set up the proper 301 redirects, and they're redirecting fine, but none of the page value is coming over. It's been about a week now, and despite re-crawls by google, I'm not seeing any change. Also, one of the original (now re-directed) product pages still has a Page Authority of 13 according to Open Site Explorer. I know it's not high, but it had us ranking in the top 5 for a very important keyword, and now that value is being wasted. For example, one of our product pages that was ranking well was startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inkyj
That page is now redirected to
http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-template I've done 301's plenty of times and I've never seen this issue, so i'm wondering if it could have something to do with having multiple installations of Wordpress. I can't see any obvious issues with it... i have the Yoast SEO plugin configured properly on both installations, and all of the pages ARE being indexed by google. Not sure what is going on. Anyone have any experience with this, or have any ideas? Thanks!!0 -
HTTPS Login on HTTP Site | 301 or 302 Redirect?
I've searched the forum on this and online and can't seem to find a definitive answer. Some e-commerce sites that are http use a 302 redirect to the https login while other sites use a 301 redirect. I know 302 is generally not recommended but in this case it may make sense. Can anyone advise on the correct practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CallMeNicholi0 -
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran20780 -
How to handle the 301 of a complete domain on URL level
We will be shutting down an old website with many (good) links, since the site has no strategic relevance anymore. We do have many other sites, but none of them has exactly the same content/topic. Nonetheless, I would like to keep the juice and redirect the site to another newer project. However, I want to redirect certain URLs of the old site to probably even different domains, depending on which content matches best with the alternative newer site. Does this make sense? Or would youjust redirect the whole domain to one other domain although they don't really have the same topic And how would you handle the URL redirects if the old site has more than 50k URLs? Because that is the case. Thanks for any advice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Windex0 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?
Hey Mozers, I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers. I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out. Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0